Parmalee to co-headline the first South Shore Country Festival

Parmalee could be the poster boys for paying your dues, which makes their success over the past few years so satisfying to them and inspiring to others.

By Jay N. Miller/For The Patriot Ledger

The notion of an “overnight sensation” hitting it big in the music industry is a quaint fantasy, most often disproven by dozens of acts that have worked years in the trenches before reaching a modicum of success. But the rockin’ country band Parmalee could be the poster boys for paying your dues, which makes their success over the past few years so satisfying to them, and inspiring to others.

Parmalee will be playing Saturday at the first South Shore Country Festival at the Marshfield Fairgrounds, co-headlining with Lone Star.

Parmalee, named (with an extra ‘e’) for the small (population 262) North Carolina town where their rehearsal barn was located, includes brothers Matt Thomas on vocals and guitar and Scott Thomas on drums, with cousin Barry Knox on bass, and longtime pal Josh McSwain on guitar. The Thomas boys’ father fronted a Southern rock band for years, and they got their start performing with him. Once father Jerry Thomas retired from the stage, his sons formed their own band, Parmalee in 2001.

After an early EP, the band released its debut album, “Inside” in 2004, and kept on playing all over the Southeast in a succession of bars and nightclubs. A couple more EPs followed, as Matt and McSwain also attended East Carolina University. Around 2010, Parmalee attracted the attention of some Nashville record company bigwigs, and by that time their original material had been burnished and refined enough to spark some genuine interest, so the future looked bright.

But fate intervened in a bad way in September 2010, after a gig at a Rock Hill, South Carolina bar called The Money. After closing time, with the band packing up, two men invaded their RV and attempted to rob them with a gun. Since Scott Thomas was licensed to carry he resisted the robbers and a shootout ensued inside the vehicle. Gunman DeMario Burris was killed in the exchange, and his cohort Dytavis Hinton was wounded and captured nearby by police, but Scott Thomas was hit three times, in the leg, stomach, and shoulder, and was in critical condition when he reached the hospital. Scott was in a coma for 10 days, and had to spend five weeks in the hospital, and it was May 2011 before he could play drums again.

Nonetheless, his first gig with the band was the long-slated showcase for the label, and Parmalee was signed on the spot. By 2013 Billboard had dubbed them one of year’s “Bubbling Under Artists.” Their major label debut “Feels Like Carolina” didn’t come out until December 2013, and it didn’t yield a hit right away, but eventually radio began playing their songs. Parmalee ended up with three Top 10 singles off the album, with “Already Callin’ You Mine,” “Close Your Eyes,” and the platinum-selling “Carolina.” The group’s profile grew quickly, as they opened tours for Brad Paisley and Jake Owens.

Last year Parmalee was a Academy of Country Music Award nominee for New Vocal Duo/Group of The Year. They’ve been finishing up their next album, and a couple of singles have already been released to good reception. Both “Roots,” which looks at their background, and “Sunday Morning,” which is a vignette about a fellow returning from some wild times to “bring the crazy down a notch” with the woman he loves, display the kind of maturity and perspective that make Parmalee’s music so engaging for fans of all ages.

The band was traveling through Illinois when we caught up with Matt Thomas, and we were curious about how their dad’s Southern rock band had influenced Parmalee’s country-rock sound.

“Well, our father’s band was Southern rock, but also did a lot of blues and soul music,” said Matt Thomas. “We’d do Travis Tritt songs, a lot of Kentucky Headhunters, and Bob Seger was a big favorite of my dad’s. And a lot of Southern soul too, and some Motown. But he was always doing covers, and we were itching to do our own original music. That no doubt helped us get established when he retired and we went out on our own, since he’s been doing the clubs for so long and we had gotten to know lots of the owners. But we wanted to go after it on our own.”

Continued Thomas: “We had been writing songs, so we figured we’d write a couple more and take our best shot. It was a risk, going from the cover band to the original thing. Our first songs were a combination of all the types of music we’d been playing with our father. Josh had been in a band with his dad also, and had a similar background. In our house, our family would listen to a lot of Allman Brothers, Delbert McClinton, and a lot of pop music too. We just love all kinds of music.

“The band started in Greenville, when we were attending Eastern Carolina,” noted Thomas. “We didn’t get to Nashville until later, and I never realized there was a school there where you could study music. So Greenville, and ECU, is where it all started.”

Scott Thomas has always been a main lyric writer, but since the band’s signing to the Stoney Creek label, he’s done a lot of co-writing. The new single “Sunday Morning,” for instance, was co-written by Scott, Josh Osborne, and Ross Copperman.

“I like that, co-writing, which is something we’ve done a lot since we got signed,” Matt said. “Even ‘Carolina’ was a co-write with our producer. When you get to do your songwriting with some of the best songwriters one earth, like we have in Nashville, you have to jump at the opportunity. I like to get in there, in a room with those other writers, and sit in there and try to catch a fish. We look at it like we’re fishin’ for a hit, and just bounce ideas off each other.”

“The other guys in the band write separately as well,” Matt added. “We’ll take everyone’s contributions and put ‘em in the pot, and let the best songs emerge when we start to play them. For this next album we had 35, potentially, which we all liked out of the hundreds we found. Then we got it down to 20, and then eventually to 12. We had already released ‘Roots’ as a single so that was already on. But it was a tough process, and there are three or four tunes I really wish could be on this record – hopefully they’ll see the light of day soon.”

Parmalee will be performing some of their forthcoming album’s music on this current tour, but will they also perhaps unveil some of those songs that didn’t quite make the cut for the record?

“Oh yes, we’ll find one we really like and keep it in the live set, absolutely,” said Matt. “The funny thing we’ve found is that songs that work live might not work for the radio, so we will continue to do some of them in our live shows that haven’t been on a record. Maybe we’ll release some of those somewhere down the road, but for the moment, they do stay in our live sets.”

What does make a good Parmalee song? We’d venture that a lively melody, direct and heartfelt lyrics that people instantly relate to, some sweet vocal harmonies, and just enough rockin’ energy to keep the honky tonk jumping.

“I think our best songs have good harmonies, and lots of guitars,” said Matt. “You also always want to have that particular ‘ear worm,’ so that people hear it once and then they start humming that melody and they don’t even know why. It is hard making it all work, so that people want to listen. It is very hard to make it perfect from top to bottom. But we figure it took us 15 years to get a real record deal, and it was at least until 2011 that we figured out what the hell we were doing. It’s even funny that ‘Carolina’ was our first big hit in 2014 or so – because that was written in 2007.”

Parmalee appreciates their success, and part of that has been discovering that New England is indeed fertile territory for country music.

“It seems like we’ve been up there in New England consistently, because it’s one of the better markets now for country music,” noted Matt Thomas. “We’ve been up there with Brad Paisley, and last year did that Country (102.5) Street Festival on Lansdowne Street in Boston. People in other parts of the country don’t always equate New England with country music fans, but its been really cool to get up there and see all the fans around that region.” IF YOU GO . . . WHAT: South Shore Country FestivalWHEN: 11:30 a.m., SaturdayWHERE: Marshfield Fairgrounds, 140 Main St. TICKETS: $39.99 in advance or $49.99 at the gate. Admission for children ages 4-12 is $15 INFO: SouthShoreCountryFestival.com